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Owain, a young Roman-Briton boy, is the only human survivor of a battle between his people and the invading Saxons. He and the hound he finds on the battlefield, whom he names Dog, head out in search of some place where they might belong. This turns out to be even more complicated than one might imagine, as Owain discovers when he comes to the abandoned city of Viriconium and takes up with a beggar girl, Regina.
Like The Shield Ring, this is a start-and-stop book, alternating sequences of intense emotion and suspense with lengthy time-skips and slow interludes of daily life. I liked many individual scenes very much and was very satisfied by the story, but it was not exactly a quick read – even less so than The Shield Ring.
I liked how Owain’s virtues are the ones generally considered passive and feminine: his courage and battlefield prowess are present but largely elided, while his endurance, patience, kindness, and self-sacrifice are the focus of the story.
Now that I’ve read three of the books in the “Dolphin Ring” sequence, which I think encompasses about a thousand years of history, it’s fascinating to see how conquerors become the conquered, and each culture in turn mourns its fall to “barbarians.” It’s one of the best examples I’ve ever read of a God’s-eye-view of history, in which the reader gets both the inexorable sequence of events and the length of time, and a sense of how every sparrow that falls is important, if only to itself.
Though the book is not particularly full of startling plot twists, the overall shape of the narrative was surprisingly difficult to predict. In case that’s a common reaction, I’ll put the rest of the plot behind a cut.
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Warning: This is by no means a “dead dog” book, in which animals are slain by the hand of the author for cheap tears and life lessons (“Kids! Being a man means shooting your own rabid dog!”) However, there are major animal characters in this book, and it takes place over a long period of time, which means that they don’t all make it to the end of the book.
Other Warning: There is a villainous character who limps, and one line in which the limp and villainy are equated. This is the opinion of the character and not representative of Sutcliff in general, who often writes very sensitively and realistically about disability.
Dawn Wind
Like The Shield Ring, this is a start-and-stop book, alternating sequences of intense emotion and suspense with lengthy time-skips and slow interludes of daily life. I liked many individual scenes very much and was very satisfied by the story, but it was not exactly a quick read – even less so than The Shield Ring.
I liked how Owain’s virtues are the ones generally considered passive and feminine: his courage and battlefield prowess are present but largely elided, while his endurance, patience, kindness, and self-sacrifice are the focus of the story.
Now that I’ve read three of the books in the “Dolphin Ring” sequence, which I think encompasses about a thousand years of history, it’s fascinating to see how conquerors become the conquered, and each culture in turn mourns its fall to “barbarians.” It’s one of the best examples I’ve ever read of a God’s-eye-view of history, in which the reader gets both the inexorable sequence of events and the length of time, and a sense of how every sparrow that falls is important, if only to itself.
Though the book is not particularly full of startling plot twists, the overall shape of the narrative was surprisingly difficult to predict. In case that’s a common reaction, I’ll put the rest of the plot behind a cut.
( Read more... )
Warning: This is by no means a “dead dog” book, in which animals are slain by the hand of the author for cheap tears and life lessons (“Kids! Being a man means shooting your own rabid dog!”) However, there are major animal characters in this book, and it takes place over a long period of time, which means that they don’t all make it to the end of the book.
Other Warning: There is a villainous character who limps, and one line in which the limp and villainy are equated. This is the opinion of the character and not representative of Sutcliff in general, who often writes very sensitively and realistically about disability.
Dawn Wind